


Night Terror

by bashert



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Minor Violence, Past Abuse, Post-Season 2, Will's crappy childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-04
Packaged: 2018-02-03 09:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1739828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bashert/pseuds/bashert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Mac knew, having dealt with it the first go round, that Will had pretty deep and awful nightmares from time to time. She wasn’t sure, Will being typically closed off about it for the most part, what he dreamt about, but she could guess.</i>
</p><p>Mac's not the only one who gets nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Terror

**Author's Note:**

> This has been languishing in my draft folder for ages. I finally decided to do something about it. The title comes from the song by Laura Marling. I'm just...not sure about this one. So. Yeah. 
> 
> And, as it deals with Will's childhood, beware there are mentions of past child abuse and alcoholism.

_I woke up and he was screaming,_

_I'd left him dreaming_

_I roll over and shake him tightly_

_and whisper_

_If they want you, oh, they're gonna have to fight me_ \- Laura Marling

* * *

 MacKenzie jerked awake, the sound of Will’s whimpering and the flailing of his long limbs having pulled her from sleep.

“Will!” She tried shaking him, but it was useless. She dodged one of his hands just in time and scrambled out of bed. The last thing she needed was to end up with a black eye courtesy of Will’s thrashing arms. She could only imagine the self-flagellation that would occur if he woke up to her with a bruised face.

“Will!” She shouted again, inching closer to the bed and tentatively placing a gentle hand on his arm.

Mac knew, having dealt with it the first go round, that Will had pretty deep and awful nightmares from time to time. She wasn’t sure, Will being typically closed off about it for the most part, what he dreamt about, but she could guess.

“Don’t touch them,” he would say, and her heart would break for both the man in the bed and the eleven-year-old he had been, clutching a broken bottle in his sweaty fist as his heart pounded and his sisters cowered behind him. “Don’t come any closer.”  

Mac never knew what to do in these circumstances. She never knew what to do when he climbed his way back into consciousness, gasping for breath and looking around the room with a wild, panicked look in his eyes. She would pull him against her, running a soothing hand through his disheveled hair and whispering that she was there and nothing was going to hurt him and hoped that she was doing the right thing. 

Will would burrow so close to her that it felt a little like he was trying to crawl into her, and she would press light kisses to his brow and curse John McAvoy.

“Will,” Mac pleaded, her voice just shy of hysterical. “Please wake up, honey. You’re okay, it’s okay. You’re in New York. You’re home. You’re safe.” No luck. Will was still deep asleep. She rubbed at her forehead in frustration, took a deep breath, and tried again, her hand on his shoulder, and was successful this time. Will shot straight up and grabbed at her wrist, his grip painful. It took only a second for him to register where he was, and he immediately dropped her hand, a devastated look on his face.

“Jesus, did I hurt you?” He asked before Mac could say anything. “ _Fuck_ , Mac. Let me see your wrist.”

“It’s fine, you didn’t hurt me,” she answered instinctively. “Are _you_ okay?”  She sat down on the bed, reaching out her hand to rest on his arm. He shuddered, and picked up her wrist, gently this time, his touch soft and reverent.

“Let me see your wrist,” he instructed again, his voice softer. He reached behind him to flip on the light and brought up her palm to his lips, placing a line of soft kisses around her wrist.

“It’s fine,” she insisted.

“It’s red,” he shot back.

“It’s _fine_ , Will. I’m more worried about you,” she cradled his chin in her free hand.

“I’d never, if I wasn’t…” he started, and she leaned forward to kiss him.

“Oh God, Will, I _know_ that,” she replied. “It was an accident.”

“I thought you were him,” Will admitted.

“I know better than to try to shake you out of a nightmare,” Mac told him.

“I still shouldn’t,” Will shook his head, and she could see how angry he was with himself.

The truth was that her knowledge of what John McAvoy did wasn’t complete, and she knew that. She hadn’t known six years ago how limited her knowledge was, but she knew now. Mac knew more now than she had before, thanks to a drunken confession by Will a few weeks after their engagement, as she tried to pour his uncoordinated limbs into bed.

“I couldn’t forgive you,” he mumbled as she slid off his shoe. “I couldn’t...my mom always forgave him. She was so weak. I couldn’t be that weak. I couldn’t cede control to you. I couldn’t.” Her hands stilled on the other shoe, and he sat up, propped up on his elbows and blinked lazily at her.

“You’re drunk,” she said bluntly. A drink with the boys to celebrate their engagement and Dantana dropping the suit had turned into many drinks, and she had been waiting at home when he stumbled through the door of their apartment, a sloppy smile on his face.

“My woman!” Will declared in a loud, inebriated voice, and she had giggled at his disjointed movements as he tried to shrug off his coat, finally taking pity on him and helping him towards the bedroom.

It had not been the time or the place to have that conversation. Will was no where near the right state of mind, but it was as if floodgates had opened and she had no way to stop the words pouring from his mouth.

He told her how it started. How his dad was only mean when he was drunk, and how he was always drunk. He told her about the stitches and the bruises and the broken bones. The way the nurses would give him and his mother looks of pity when they ended up in the emergency room. How his father broke his mother’s nose and how Will, all of ten and a half years old, had to drive her to the hospital as she spit out blood, his feet barely reaching the pedals.

“It was a good thing I was tall for my age,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice that broke Mac, made her choke back a sob.

He talked about hiding his sisters and brother in the closet, but making himself visible, so if John was going to hit someone, he’d hit him. He talked about how angry he was with his mother, but how much he loved her too, and how he wasn’t ever sure what to do about that.

He talked about how it ended. About how he finally got big enough, strong enough, to hit back. How he grabbed a broken bottle and threatened his dad with it, screamed at his mother to take his little sisters and his little brother and get out of the house. How his mother listened, didn’t even turn back to see if Will was still standing.

It was awful, so much more awful than she had thought. She _hated_ John McAvoy. Hated him with a ferocity that surprised even herself. And she hated Lynette McAvoy too, a little, hated that she wasn’t strong enough, didn’t have enough support, to get her and her kids away from John.

And she wanted to weep for the little boy Will was, and the little boy he never got to be.

The next morning, when Will woke up, she gently asked if he wanted to talk about it some more, wanted to fill in some of the blanks. His drunken confession had left quite a few holes that Mac was desperately curious about, but he had shaken his head emphatically.

“I just want to be able to help you,” she said softly. “I just want to understand.”

“The past’s the past, Mac,” Will said. “It’s done enough damage already, let’s not give it the chance to do more.”

And that had been that. She knew better than to push him, and he was trying to open more to her, let her in, but he had fifty years of learning to swallow down his feelings, lock away his emotions, and it was hard to unlearn that kind of behavior.

But then nights like these happened, and she was left feeling useless, and she hated, more than anything, feeling useless.

“Will,” Mac tried again. “I really am fine.”  She gently pried her wrist from his light grip.  She bit her bottom lip, worried it between her teeth, and then asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” The answer would be no. The answer was always no.  So it didn’t surprise her when Will shook his head.

“I should go get some ice for your wrist, stay here,” he said gruffly, throwing his legs over the side of the bed and hurrying out of the room before Mac could put up an argument.

* * *

Will closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on the cool, glossy surface of the refrigerator. He knew that Mac’s wrist didn’t need ice, he had just needed a minute alone, a minute to quiet all of the noise in his head.

He could have seriously hurt her.

Just.

 _Fuck_ John McAvoy.

The guy was dead and buried and he was still haunting Will.

His dreams about his father, while thankfully rare, were always specific. This one was when he was eight. His dad had been gone for a few weeks, working on a job that took him out of town for a little while, and Will had looked forward to those weeks when John was gone, and the house was quiet. He wasn’t supposed to be home yet, and Will had been reading in the living room when the door came flying open, his father’s heavy footsteps reverberating through the house.

Will knew enough to know that his dad had been fired. It wasn’t the first time, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. John losing a job was enough to send him into the kind of rage that would last for days (but at least Will knew _why_ his father was angry. It was worse when his father was in a good mood, when Will never knew what might tip him over the edge). Will had dropped his book, raced through the house to where his little sisters were, grabbed both of them by their tiny arms and dragged them into the closet, telling them to stay there and quiet while he went to get the baby. His baby brother Timmy was only ten months old, and Will found him sleeping in his crib in the room they shared. He scooped him up and had just enough time to press him into his sister Susan’s arms, shutting the door behind them, when he heard John’s voice yell through the house looking for them.

Will had swallowed hard and left the bedroom. He wasn’t sure where his mother was; maybe she might have been at the store, or maybe outside. Will didn’t remember. The rest of the details were hazy, but somehow he ended up backed up against the living room wall, his father towering over him, as Will pleaded with him to stay away, and sent silent messages to his sisters to _stay hidden, stay hidden, don’t cry, don’t make a sound, stay hidden_.

That day resulted in fourteen stitches.

“ _He fell off his bike_ ,” was what his mother told the nurse, who didn’t believe her, but didn’t ask any questions. This was Nebraska, in the sixties, where the old “spare the rod, spoil the child” philosophy was deeply rooted and strongly observed. They patched up Will and never asked questions they didn’t want to hear the answer to. If someone suspected what was happening, they certainly didn’t speak up.

Will let out a shuddering sigh and pulled open the freezer door, reaching in for an ice pack. As he opened a drawer to grab a tea towel to wrap it in, he heard the sound of Mac’s soft footfalls, the sound so different than the sound of his father’s pounding feet.

“I don’t need that,” Mac said, her voice flat. “You didn’t hurt me. You’d never hurt me.” She came around the island in the kitchen, taking the ice pack out of his hand and returning it to the freezer.

Maybe he hadn’t hurt her, but he _could_ have. And he couldn’t stand the thought of her hurt, even slightly, even accidentally, by his hands.

When his father was on the wagon, in those brief spells where he had a job, where they had enough money to buy food and pay the water and electric bill, John and Lynette were sickeningly sweet with each other. They would dance on the back porch, John would bring her home flowers, and it was confusing as hell for a terrified fucking kid. Then he would start drinking, and everything would kaleidoscope, and his mother would cower under his father’s raised fist, and Will could never understand, would never understand, how things could change so rapidly.

Even when he was so angry with MacKenzie he couldn’t see straight, he couldn’t imagine physically hurting her (although, when he was feeling particularly self-aware, he acknowledged that he hurt her in different ways. Through words, barbed and cruel, because he could, because she had hurt him first, because John McAvoy never taught him how to be kind to the ones you loved, but only how to strike back harder).

Will let out a long, ragged sigh and leaned forward so that both hands were splayed on the counter, letting his head hang down and taking a moment to close his eyes. He knew that he needed to tell her more. Let her in, let her know. She understood so much about him, understood him better than anyone ever had, but there was still so much that she couldn’t understand. Not without knowing all the details.

“Will,” Mac’s voice was soft, and her hand, where it landed on the middle of his back, was warm. “You okay?”

“It was...the dream…” he started. “I was eight. I ended up with fourteen stitches that day. He knocked me into the side table and I hit my head on the corner. I wasn’t sure what I had done to...It took me a long time to realize I hadn’t done anything. I was just there.” He trailed off and shrugged. To her credit, Mac didn’t gasp, didn’t send him looks of pity and of horror, but instead absorbed the information, her face unreadable. Will straightened up.”It’s too late for this heavy of a conversation. Let’s go to bed.”

Mac narrowed her eyes slightly, looking as if she wanted to argue, as if the questions were on the tip of her tongue, before acquiescing, slipping her arm around his waist and leaning her body into his. He brushed a kiss onto the crown of her head. He didn’t begrudge her curiosity. She was a journalist by nature, wanting the story, the whole story, all the gory details, unembellished and unvarnished. She had never pushed him before, when they were together all those years ago, maybe because she knew enough to know that she didn’t want to know.

“You didn’t deserve that,” Mac said quietly as they climbed back into bed. She turned and cradled his face in her hands, pressing the lightest of kisses to the tip of his nose. “He never deserved _you_.” And Will tipped forward, burying his head in her collarbone as her fingers threaded gently through his hair.

“Tomorrow,” he said pulling back slightly. “I’m going to make an appointment with Habib...I think you...I want you to come too.” And her eyes widened in surprise, but she nodded slightly. "I know I'm not always the most..."

"We don't have to do this right now, Will," Mac was quick to reassure, and he picked up her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm.

"No, I know, I just want you to know that I've never told anyone because..." he shrugged. It was late and he was suddenly exhausted and he wasn't sure how to put into words all the things he wanted to say to her, wanted her to know. "But I want you there. At Habib's. I think it's important." Mac gave him a watery smile, and kissed him lightly on the lips.

"Okay," she said simply. "I love you, you know that?" 

"I had an inkling," he teased, and tugged her closer. Mac wrapped her long limbs around his body, and tucked her head into his neck.

And he let himself drift back to sleep.


End file.
